Tip: OCD and Past Events

You know how sometimes your mind will bring up some embarrassing past event from years ago in order to throw your day slightly out of whack? I would bet that you do, as it is a pretty relatable human experience. Unfortunately, for those people with OCD, the difficulty of these experiences can often be compounded as your mind is going to try to lie to you about the details of these past events. It will take whatever your OCD worry is at the time (say harm, self-harm, deviant sexual thoughts, etc.), dredge up a perfectly normal past event, and try to warp it into something terrible.

For instance, you might just be watching the news and see a story about a friendly local babysitter. Instead of a “normal” reaction in which you acknowledge the news and quickly move on, your OCD mind might try to make this simple news story into an anxiety-provoking issue. It could try to involve your own babysitting experiences, which were perfectly normal and pleasant. But now, it will try to convince you that you hurt the kids in some way and that someday the police will catch you and put you in jail. And while, at your core, you know this is not true and you know that you would never ever harm those kids, OCD is the doubting disorder for a reason. If just the thought was not bad enough, OCD will also put false, terrible images into your minds of you hurting the kids you babysat. And even though you still know that these images never occurred, you are still left struggling with them because OCD is so powerful. So now, a past event that you had never even had a second thought about has become nightmare fuel in the span of a couple minutes thanks to OCD. And you are just left with the thought of “why are you doing this to me OCD?!”

The babysitting example is just one of many as OCD will use this nefarious practice for any worry in any situation. Totally consensual and positive sexual encounters can be twisted into sexual assault by OCD. Childhood thoughts of how cute Simba or Nala from The Lion King were can be altered by OCD into bestiality. A rainy night five years ago when you had one beer after work and went home can be distorted into a hit and run attempt on your part. The possibilities for OCD are endless and it will use anything it has at its disposal. So what can you do to counter OCD in these situations?

The first tool as always is awareness. For me, I know that OCD is going to attempt to bring up past events at any time, and this helps me be a little better prepared for when they do arise. I also know that OCD likes to use a couple specific instances more often than others so I am doubly prepared for those. And awareness is helpful in general, but what should you do when you get hit with a OCD version of a past event for the first time? Obviously, the ideal method (as OCD therapy teaches you) would be to allow the event/thought and its corresponding anxiety to just sit there in your mind, unattended to, until it fades. But sometimes, this lofty approach is just not possible in the nitty gritty of the moment when the anxiety feels overwhelming. So what I would do is give it as many checks as I had to at the time (less checks is the ideal, but like I said previously, sometimes the OCD is too strong and you just have to do what you have to do). Then, I would note that I had attended to/checked that specific event and I had “solved” it. So now, the next time that event came up, instead of checking it and going through that same anxious cycle, I would know that I had already checked it and that it was all well and good in my mind. This method helped me a lot, and even though there were still some times when I had to re-check when the event came up again, in general, I was much less anxious the next time OCD brought up that same event.

I have also done exposures with the events that come up more frequently in order to desensitize myself to the false fears they present. So I write the details of the event (the OCD version, not the actual one) down, read those details multiple times, and think about them as much as I can in the moments I am practicing the exposure. This helps to preempt the event and reduce the anxiety associated with the event by making my mind view the event as insignificant rather than as something worthy of mental alarm bells. I know that I have never done, nor did I ever want to do, whatever disgusting past event OCD is trying to push onto me at that moment. And I utilize exposures in order to help convince the anxious part of my mind of what I know to be true–that these fake OCD events never happened and are nothing to worry about.